Worldsfactory had the chance to interview Project Manager Guillaume Blanchard, and asks a few questions about Styx: Master of Shadows.
More information.What was your inspiration to create a stealth game such as Styx? This seems quite different from the usual genres you’ve done so far.
There are many fans of stealth games at Cyanide; we were just waiting for the right time to make this game.Our experience with Unreal Engine 3 on Game of Thrones told us it’d be the perfect tool to create a stealth game where each situation can be constructed to offer the player a quality challenge. At the same time, we saw that Styx, one of the main characters in Of Orcs and Men, was well loved by the players. The marriage between the two felt like a natural match to make the stealth game we wanted: a return to the genre’s roots where infiltration is the only way to play. Playing a goblin allows us to revisit the stealth genre through an original character: more agile, frail, but with magical powers. Playing a goblin is a great way to make the players understand that charging in headfirst is not a good option in our game.
Styx is a prequel to Of Orcs and Men. Do you believe that game to have been somewhat misunderstood? Many have praised the unique point of view as compared to siding with humans as usual, but the game ultimately got mediocre scores.
Of Orcs And Men has great qualities like an original background, a strong story and good voice acting and music. We’re trying to make original games and therefore we not expecting them to achieve mass acceptance. That said, when the targeted players are not satisfied, it means that there are some defects that we have to analyze objectively to improve and make our games better and better. That’s what we did for Styx: Master of Shadows, by paying special attention to the core gameplay and level design.